August 8, 2012
STATE OF THE ASSOCIATION
JULIUS MASON: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm The PGA of America's Julius Mason, and I would like to welcome you to the 94th PGA Championship here at Kiawah Island Golf Resort.
There are a few people in the audience that I would like to introduce you to now, beginning with The PGA of America vice president, Ted Bishop; honorary president, Jim Remy; a collection of past presidents and PGA of America board members amongst yourselves: From Kiawah Island, PGA director of golf, Brian Gerard.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, it's my pleasure to introduce from Hillendale Country Club in Phoenix, Maryland, the 37th president of The PGA of America, Mr.Allen Wronowski.
ALLEN WRONOWSKI: Good morning, everyone, and thank you, Julius, and welcome, everyone, to the 94th PGA Championship. We are once again pleased to have the strongest field in golf with 103 of the top 103 world ranked players.
This year we have 71 international players in our field representing 21 countries, which is more than any other U.S. event. And to remind everybody, this is the only allprofessional major championship, and we are so privileged to have the 20 PGA club professionals in the field, led by our Professional National Champion, Matt Dobyns, of Sea Cliff, New York.
We appreciate also the Carolina Section as one of our 41 sections of the PGA of America and the largest section of the PGA of America with more than 1600 men and women professionals, and this week, we will have over 20 of them represented and volunteering their time and talents for the Ocean Course.
As we talk about The Ocean Course, what an unbelievable golf course. Certainly is very, very unique and very, very demanding. The view of the ocean from each hole means that the golf course is exposed to the area's briskest breezes and certainly the unpredictable winds. Pete Dye, with no prevailing wind here, essentially designed the two courses into one, one for an easterly wind and one for a westerly wind.
I know Kerry Haigh discussed all of the specifics of our conditions of play yesterday and how we will rule on the sandy areas, so I won't go into any detail of that.
Certainly an exciting week, also, for The PGA of America, as this week, we will button up the eight spots where players qualify through the points system. The U.S. Ryder Cup Team will be determined at the conclusion of this week, and our captain Davis Love will finalize the team on September 4.
We will have a media session with Davis and myself this coming Monday in Charleston.
You may have seen some of the PSAs about launching the new Get Golf Ready and a bigger campaign, and if we could, let's watch these two spots.
(PSA played.)
This year, we have about 3,000 Get Golf Readycertified facilities nationwide, and for the first time, we have a Get Golf Ready Family Zone that has been created as a free traveling golf festival in the Charleston area parks, and it's an attraction to get golf in the community and get more people playing and enjoying the game.
And with, that player development, the Tee It Forward Program, can't thank the USGA enough for their support of Tee It Forward. I know I certainly enjoyed my time with Glen Nager, the president of the USGA, as well as the presidents of the others. We teed it forward and had just a great day and a lot of fun and excitement. We have about 3,000 facilities of that also on board for this year, and it's catching on because amateurs enjoy it. It's a better way to play the game at a yardage that's more acceptable, more fun, and find out that most of them feel that we play faster.
Being a professional still on facility, I can tell you that my members have been ecstatic. They come in and talk about shooting lower scores than they have in five or ten years, talk about the number of birdies they made, and quite a few times I've had people say, I was thinking about giving up or quitting but this has given me renewed hope and interest. I know it's certainly given me renewed hope and interest, and it's lot more fun, because we certainly don't hit it like the great players that we have with us this week.
We had two really exciting community relations initiatives this year with the Kiawah Island Resort. We partnered with the Links to Success program, which assists the region's most atrisk and underperforming schools in order to increase high school graduation rates. Within two years, participating schools have shown consistent improvement and higher ratings.
I was fortunate to be there for the Sea Island Habitat for Humanity ribbon cutting on Sunday where we built a house in the Charleston area. The house was built in roughly a twoweek time span from June 23 to July 7. 200 volunteers took more than 425 shifts to complete the house. When you saw Lauren Francis speak to the crowd, you know how much that having a project like that means to individuals in the community and the lasting legacy that that program will create. A $50,000 contribution was made between The PGA of America and the Kiawah Island Resort.
PGA Junior Golf League, can't tell you how excited about this; everybody knows how passionate I am about junior golf. We are really excited to announce a new initiative called the PGA Junior League, where we have partnered with LEJ Sports outside of Texas, and it's just like the thousands of kids that play the other sports, whether it be baseball, soccer, the team consists of kids who get to wear jerseys with numbers on their back, and this year, in our inaugural year, we had 1800 juniors between the ages of 7 to 13 compete through 123 teams and in 22 cities around the country.
There will be a National Championship that will be played at Cog Hill this coming September in Chicago.
Tonight, I know we are all excited, it's our annual Distinguished Service Award. This year we will be honoring our 1991 U.S. Ryder Cup Team captain, which was played right here at Kiawah, Mr.Dave Stockton, who also played on two Ryder Cup teams himself, was a twotime PGA Champion, and I hope to see you all in Charleston tonight as we give Dave Stockton some incredible recognition.
With, that let me turn it over to our CEO and honorary member, Mr.Joe Steranka.
JOE STERANKA: Thank you, Allen. This is a special site for us to return to. It's where the modern day Ryder Cup was born, on the Ocean Course.
This championship, also, since it is the championship whose identity is born out of 27,000 PGA professionals that make us the largest sports organization in the world and the leading driver of the golf industry in this country; in addition to crowning the final page or champion of the year, it gives us the opportunity in our conversations with you and our media partners to speak on behalf of the state of the game.
Our PerformanceTrak system that we use to measure the relevance of the game as a business around the country; we have got 16,000 small businesses that are America's Golf Courses, where many of those 27,000 professionals are employed; those rounds played are up 14 percent year over year, which is we believe a testament not only to sustained good weather throughout the year, albeit hot in many areas of the country but the work of golf professionals following the lead of folks like Ted Bishop, our vice president, who has been a great advocate for Get Golf Ready and many other initiatives such as those that Allen spoke about.
It's gaining traction, and shows that even in this postrecession world, that golf is an important part of the fun and recreation of folks' lives.
In my role with World Golf Foundation and Chief Executive of the PGA, have led much of the work to elevate the stature of golf in Washington, D.C., and the state capitals. We talk about we are golf, stating the economic and the human and the environmental impact of golf, and that has certainly been the case here in South Carolina, a state that certainly gets it in terms of understanding the importance of golf, not just this week where we have a $92 million economic impact of this PGA Championship, but really weekin, weekout. There are 33,000 South Carolinians that have jobs that putt food on table for their families because of the golf industry in this great state, over 300 golf facilities and many other golfrelated businesses that allow those folks to earn some $800 million in wages. Golf tourism for this state is a $1.2billionayear industry with three quarters of a billion people that make golf trips to the state of South Carolina.
It's great that 800 PGA professionals are the leading part of the 33,000 jobs; but when you get Governor Nikki Haley and House Speaker Bobby Harrell, and we had U.S. Congressman Tim Scott at our government relations lunch yesterday, and they all are fans or participants in golf at varying levels. We would like to get them all to play more. But they certainly are uniform in their high respect and understanding of the importance of golf.
Part of what we do when we come to a community is turn the spotlight of the media coverage of an important sports event on the host community. Having a thousand of you that are coming in and reporting to over a dozen countries around the world is important; the 28 hours of television coverage in High Definition this year, that our partners at CBS and TNT provide and a total of 125 hours of production that is now broadbanded out via PGA.COM. We have seen, and this goes back, this is our 22nd year now with Turner; and when we introduced four days of cable coverage in what is now 18 hours of cable coverage, folks said, do you really think fans are going to consume that much television? And the answer is, absolutely.
So 125 hours on broadband and we are finding great traffic even though the Olympics has got a fair amount of content of their own coming out.
One of the things in Washington, D.C., again, that we talk about, is the human impact of golf, and I'm wearing one of the pedometers that we hand out that I think a number of you are wearing, as well, to remind people that this is a healthy activity that we can have.
But maybe the most important and rewarding thing is what we do from a charitable standpoint. We have got 57 charities involved here, but for the last several years, we have used the PGA Championship to launch America's attention about the Folds of Honor Foundation and Patriot Golf Day. Coincidentally, I'm the chairman of the Folds of Honor this year and their board of directors, but our association since the inception of Patriot Golf Day was captivated by Major Dan Rooney, who is with us today; Major Ed Pulido, your tireless efforts; PGA professional Tony Biata, who has helped grow the game and participation among PGA professionals.
But when we have a spouse of a fallen hero come into our board room as happened earlier this week and speak from the heart about what impact, not the $5,000 contribution to a scholarship for her children has, but more as she said, that her husband's contribution to keep this country safe was not forgotten.
So for that, I would like to recognize Leslie Bauguess, the spouse of one of our fallen heros and one of the recipients of the Folds of Honor Scholarship. Thank you. (Applause.)
So we know that your daughters, Ryan and Ellie, even though they are just 11 and 10 now, they have a bright future ahead of them. I guess Duke has already identified one of your daughters to get into a gifted program, and we know the Folds of Honor and the PGA will be there to support you as you give the gift of education to them.
So, again, great to be with you. This is a very proud moment for me to look back over 25 years of PGA Championships and see where it's grown, and to be able to work with great gentlemen like Allen Wronowski, we've got a great lineup coming in the years to follow with Ted Bishop and Derek Sprague.
Thanks, and we'll turn it back to you, Julius.
Q. You bring up 25 years for yourself, I was curious where perhaps the search for your replacement stands now in the search process.
ALLEN WRONOWSKI: There's a search committee that's been formed. There's a firm that's been hired. We are already vetting through candidates. There will be a meeting this week as we continue the process. The transition has been absolutely spectacular. We are moving forward.
Q. Is there a timetable?
ALLEN WRONOWSKI: No timetables. Don't want to make it too fast, too long. We will take the appropriate amount of time and really take a good look at where we are going to go.
Q. I know that you've said in print a couple of times, your goal was to leave the game in better shape than you found it here at the end of your tenure. Both of you will be transitioning from your positions at the end of the year; do you feel good about that statement still, that the game is in better shape than when you guys first came into your positions, and what will be the highlights of your career, do you think, as you look back?
JOE STERANKA: Well, I'll go first. We still have a couple more highlights we think to finish up this week and then in September at Medinah. I see Richard Hills, who is the director of the European Ryder Cup back there, and they are going to send out a great team to battle us and Captain Love.
I won't speak too much about the highlights, but I will say, this has been a challenging time for golf professionals and business owners. And it speaks to the importance of making sure that our elected leaders and other community spokespeople understand the value of that local golf course. It might employ 40 or 50 people, and the business survival rate of golf courses through this recession has been over 99 percent a year of those business stay going.